Jean Renoir’s GRAND ILLUSION continues its seventy-fifth anniversary celebration as part of Film Forum’s “The French Old Wave” series
GRAND ILLUSION (Jean Renoir, 1937)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Monday, September 10, 5:10
Series continues through September 13
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
If you’ve never seen this remarkable cinematic achievement, prepare to be overwhelmed by Jean Renoir’s antiwar masterpiece. The first foreign film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, Grand Illusion is set in a POW camp during WWI, where everyman pilot Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin), by-the-book Captain de Boieldieu (Pierre Fresnay), lovable Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), and others are being held by the aristocratic Captain von Rauffenstein (an unforgettable Erich von Stroheim). Proclaimed “cinematic public enemy no. 1” by Joseph Goebbels, Grand Illusion takes on anti-Semitism, class structure, and religion in addition to war, a humanist film that is as relevant as ever seventy-five years after its initial release. It will be screening on September 10 at Film Forum as part of “The French Old Wave” in a new 35mm restored print (shown earlier this year at Film Forum), made in honor of the film’s seventy-fifth anniversary. The series continues through September 13 with such classics as Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and Renoir’s The Rules of the Game in addition to double features of Jean Grémillon’s Lumière d’Eté and Le Ciel Est à Vous, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Assassin Habite au 21 and Quai des Orfèvres, and Grémillon’s Remorques and L’Étrange Monsieur Victor.